VentureBeat

Giga Omni Media, the company that owns news blog GigaOM and its related sites, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in additional funding.

The last few months have been busy for Om Malik’s fledgling media empire. He acquired mobile blog jkOnTheRun in July, followed by TheAppleBlog just a few weeks ago. He also promoted chief operating officer Paul Walborsky to chief executive, and announced some new syndication deals, including one with The New York Times (where VentureBeat will also be syndicated). More surprisingly, Malik also announced that he has become a venture partner at True Ventures, GigaOM’s main venture backer. (Despite Malik’s assurances, the role seems like a bit of a distraction, and a complication for GigaOM’s venture coverage.)

Malik says the new funding will go towards expanding the company’s events and briefings, as well as adding to its portfolio, which means starting or acquiring even more blogs. The money also gives Giga Omni Media a bit of a cushion in case the economic downturn continues. The round was led by new investor Alloy Ventures, with True Ventures participating, along with angel investors Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajamaran.

This is pretty heartening news. Sure, Malik is ostensibly our competitor, but he was also an early inspiration for VentureBeat. It’s nice to see a blog network growing aggressively despite the economic chill, in contrast to the cutbacks at other sites.

Here’s the latest action:

Yahoo has a bad day, but it could have been much worse — The Internet giant announced its earnings today and fell short of expectations, but only by about a penny-a-share. Net income was down 19 percent from the same quarter last year. Still, considering it no longer has a Carl Icahn-led hostile takeover to worry about, the company can — and more importantly, will live with these numbers.

Icahn’s wild weekend — While Yahoo was busy breathing a sigh of relief now that the Icahn takeover “distraction” (as Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang called it on the earnings call today) is behind them, Icahn got back to writing about Yahoo on his blog. His new post is entitled “How I Spent My Weekend” — no, really. He’ll be here all week folks, try the veal.

Shuffle at the top of Etsy — The online marketplace for handmade things has announced that Maria Thomas, its former chief operating officer, will now be its chief executive. Founder Rob Kalin will now be the chief creative officer. It also announced Chad Dickerson as its new chief technology officer. Dickerson leaves his job as the head of the Yahoo Brickhouse special projects group. Yes, that’s another Yahoo exec who is leaving.

Sugar ends its relationship with NBC — The female-oriented blog network has decided to take charge of its own advertising. Too bad that Lauren Zalaznick, president of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal, just played up its partnership with Sugar in announcing the BlogHer deal last week.

GigaOM scoops up a mobile blog — jkOnTheRun joins the Giga Omni Media network of blogs. Read about it from Om Malik himself.

MySpace announces support of OpenID — If you have an account with MySpace you can now use it to login to any other site supporting OpenID.

Ryan Block leaves Engadget — The editor of the popular gadget blog (left) is leaving to start an undisclosed new project with another former Engadget editor, Peter Rojas.

Google walking directions — In the spirit of summer, Google now allows you to get directions tailored for those who may not want to drive or take public transportation to a destination.

Joost goes to China — Maybe it’ll fare better there than it has in the U.S. NewTeeVee has the details.

Twitter acknowledges spam issue — The micro-messaging service is fully aware that marketers and others are signing up for accounts and mass-friending people. It does not like that, as it writes in its blog.